When a nation is hacked: Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach
Remember when OPM got breached last year? There was a lot of excitement in various parts of the world (namely the US) because here we had a government department (Office of Personnel Management), and they’d just lost 21.5 million records! These records included such sensitive data as names, dates of birth and addresses and by any reasonable measure, it was serious – that’s almost 7% of the country’s population!
Yet somehow, last week’s news that 55 million Filipino voters’ data was now out in the wild went largely unnoticed. Let’s put it down to a very western-centric tech media but move past that and look at this incident for what it is – a ginormous data breach with extremely sensitive information and at 55M individuals, that’s also more than half the country’s population.